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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Reinstall Windows 7

The HP ProBook 4230s ships with 4 primary partitions: 2 for Windows 7 and 2 others that I don’t remember. Thus I had to reinstall Windows 7 from scratch using the Windows DVD and not the HP recovery disk. The later restores the whole disk, including the partitions.

Debian installation

Choose language

After selecting the menu entry, immediately go back and select it again. This time we can not only choose the default and other locales, but also

Language: english

Country: Viet Nam. This is important because it allows the choose the correct timezone later

Default locale: en_US.UTF-8

No other locales

Detect network hardware

The installer complains about the missing firmware the the RealTek Ethernet card rtl_nic/rtl8168e-2.fw. I’ve ignored this, because I was using the Atheros AR9285 wireless adapter which works out-of-the-box.

Download installer components

No additional components are needed.

Set up users and passwords

Because of the special partitioning (see below): don’t create a normal user account.

Partition disks

I’m using the manual setup. The idea is:

to create a Linux data partition

to leave space to expand all partitions (Windows and Linux, system and data) if needed later.

All partitions are created at the beginning

Linux system, primary, 50 GB after the main Windows partition.

Swap, logical, 4 GB

Linux data, logical 50 GB

Now we delete the 50 GB Linux system partition and recreate it with 25 GB at the end. By this we have 25 GB spare between the Windows and Linux system partitions.

The whole disk now looks like this:

#1

primary

105 MB

ntfs

#2

primary

70 GB

ntfs

unusable

25 GB

unusable

#4

primary

25 GB

ext4

/

#6

logical

4 GB

swap

swap

#7

logical

50 GB

ext4

/data

logical

220 GB

FREE SPACE

#5

logical

100 GB

ntfs

Select and install software

Under this item, I’ve only selected the option Laptop and Standard system utilities, but not Debian desktop environment.

Finish the installation

Windows 7 uses UTC for the system clock: choose No.

Post-installation

After rebooting from the installation, I’ve made the following changes:

install the packages firmware-realtek and gpm.
For the RealTek firmware, I’m not sure if the package is really needed, after removing it,
the network card still comes up.

Adjust the console font (for my taste (and age) the default is too small)
in /etc/default/console-setup set FONTFACE="Terminus" and FONTSIZE="10x20"
see the manual page for supported values and apply/test the changes with setupcon.

Uninstall the Debian windows installer

Just run the uninstaller in c:\win32-loader.

Set-up X

By my own definition, X is started in runlevel 3. Until everything works fine make sure, that in /etc/inittab the default runlevel is 2 id:2:initdefault:. After everything is configured and tested, one can change it to 3.

X-Server

Install the package xinit with all its dependencies. The only video driver that is really needed is xserver-xorg-video-intel.
I’ve also added the suggested packages mesa-utils, xfonts-75dpi and xfonts-scalable.

Display and Window manager

I’m using xdm as display manager. After the package installation adjust the runlevel with update-rc.d xdm disable 2 (see above).

The windows manager is wmaker, I like it because of its simplicity and because it does not try to mimic a Windows desktop.
Install it together with the packages wmaker-data and menu.